I like the first video a lot. There's an almost childish innocence to his music. It shows he never really had formal training. Not that there's anything wrong with that. In his case it gives the music something fresh and spontanious. It's limited on one hand and impressive on the other. And the way he commands that orchestral sound with all those custom built boxes and pedals is very impressive too.

Yes....could be Forrest. Vangelis has some sort of corresponding symbols on his pedals as well. I like the idea of inferred notation.

I remember seeing a Hans Zimmerman score, well the one part he performed and it was numerical, alphabetical and not annotated in the tradition, I guess a language he could understand. Being self taught.

From what I have read it is call the Direct system, and it is a custom made preset selector, transposer, and midi sequencer for controlling his numerous hardware synths, mostly old 90s digital synths and samplers. The symbols are his "figure coding" that he has used for years, dating back to the 70s to represent different sounds. The Direct system was based on and expanded upon the old 80s Zyklus sequencer which has become a bit of a legion of its time as an interesting real time performance midi sequencer. Very few were made and they are hard to come by, but their is a free software version on the web.